Posts tagged ‘fsfe’

Since there have been a few blog posts about GNOME 3 already, I’m sure you don’t mind me adding one. I’m one of those who don’t do any work, just lurk around and wait for stuff to be fixed — or working in the first place. I also don’t like compiling GNOME myself. I barely touched the already packaged stuff in the repository of our Debian GNOME packaging team. But I run unstable plus stuff from experimental. I’ll thus have a bit of a different experience with GNOME 3 than current testing users who at least in parts don’t seem to like what they’re getting.

That being said… I love it.

No, I don’t mind running network manager on my systems, I even have it on my netbook (Atom processor). I used wicd for a long time because network manager really got nothing done back in the days (half a year ago or what :)). Nowadays, since version 0.9, it works fine for me. No fiddling around with config files, perfect integration in the desktop, and LAN and WLAN Just Work [tm].

No, I don’t like if some weird dependencies dictate what tools to use. I usually used pidgin for messaging, for instance. Now I’m using empathy, simply because it’s best integrated in GNOME. And no, I won’t switch from mutt to evolution. :-P

And there are more such cases. Also, these weird accessibility tools that are stuck in the gnome-shell “top panel”, I don’t need them. Still there. (There’s an extension to remove it, by the way.) Also, I must say, GNOME 3.2 is a lot better than 3.0 already. And I think 3.4 might do the final trick for me.

Fact is, with GNOME 3 I have a much cleaner desktop, there is more room for windows (which is nice on a netbook display), there are web apps which I already use a lot, and it has a professional, not too playful look (i.e. a few effects, clear and consistent theming, no bubbling windows). And the new notification stuff is just awesome, especially with the empathy integration.

Oh, and too many mouse click to access an application? 1) Put your most used apps in the favorites bar (or whatever it is called); it’s just one click then. 2) Press your meta-key (that way our name for the windows key, or was that the ESC key? Whatever, press your windows key), type in the first two or three letters of your application, and hit enter; you don’t need a mouse at all.

Using zsh as default shell is perfect. Using grml-zsh stuff to configure it, even better. Using XTaran’s config, way better. Using your own config, invaluable. Now, there is one thing that always bothered me: having all hosts I usually deal with in my ~/.ssh/config in order to have tab completion (and short names). I wanted to improve the situation and was kindly pointed in a different direction by Myon, namely to just use the ~/.ssh/known_hosts for tab completion. How about that?

I started playing around with the config and, as it turns out, Axel already has something ready. Unfortunately, it didn’t fulfill all my needs yet. That is because I have multiple known_hosts files. Martin already filed a bug to have ssh read ~/.ssh/known_hosts.d/* but that isn’t resolved yet either, even though upstream is aware of it. I thus had to point tab completion and ssh to multiple files by hand. But that’s not too bad for now. Let’s have a look:

What am I doing? Well, we need to deactivate the hashing of known hosts. Otherwise your known_hosts files aren’t readable as needed. Then you define your known_hosts files for the domains you care about. Pretty straight forward.

Now, how about tab completion in zsh? Well, easy part actually:

[ -f ~/.ssh/config ] && : ${(A)ssh_config_hosts:=${${${${(@M)${(f)"$(

What's here? We read and parse your ~/.ssh/config for configured hosts, then we parse all your known_hosts files which are for me: ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ~/.ssh/known_hosts.work, and ~/.ssh/known_hosts.debian. And lastly, all is added to zsh completion for hosts. That actually works. :)

Countless times already have I used Google’s amazing feature called maps. Admittedly, if you know me, you might wonder how I can be advertising Google. At least as often as I used google maps, I have told people about google’s evilness. They’re making their users transparent in ways most people can’t even imagine — transparent to other users (just like Facebook does) but, more importantly, transparent to themselves and their advertising customers. Technically skilled people reading my blog probably just nod and scoll down now… :) Well, there still is something about Google that makes me use their developments: they are good. I don’t know any other online service to create own maps, get directions etc. with as much detail and huge amount of data as google delivers. Thus, Google maps became my main source for locations and directions world wide. As such, I wanted to use it to get directions between places in Berlin, Germany. Apparently, Google’s software had some kind of hick up or whatever, though. They got the directions right but somehow I doubt the map is anyhow related to what I requested. See for yourself…Yes, yes, no software is perfect… but still :)

Since thousands of people seem to like RSA keys these days and my key is “old” anyways, I thought: how about running where the other lemmings run… So, here it is, my transition to a new gpg key. A properly written transition document is to be found here, obviously signed by both the old and the new key. I’d appreciate signatures if your signing policy allows (and you’re not insanely signing anything that looks like it could be signed).

Been playing with that thought for a while now, finally got to rebuilding it for lenny, now I’m using it… tmux is the new screen. To have fun already I read a few short introductions and got myself a few suggestions for a proper .tmux.conf. So, for root I have this one now:

Why ‘tmux attach’? Because tmux would start a new session which I don’t want it to. The config already starts a session which we can immediately attach to. Also, when such session was started I can attach to it as a user with the very same command over and over again. That makes it pretty handy as I always have htop, aptitude and a free shell available in a nice tmux session. Great. How did I live until now? ;-)

It’s pretty off topic for my blog since I usually only blog about technical stuff. But this is just great. Real life people having a real look at concerts of prominent and not-so-prominent musicians. And it’s all in German which is a nice thing since most of such stuff I have to find on English web sites (except the obvious German big press influence). Made me notice I missed the concert of Jamie Cullum — of course. But the article is quite nice and I definitely enjoy reading more of those. Have a look if you’re as keen on music as I am, or not. :)

It seems I’ve missed quite a few weeks in my countdown to our Mini DebConf. Fortunately, it’s not too late for you to join — even if, right now, you don’t know why you should! So what’s the status?

Well, we’ve had out problems in the beginning to start the whole thing but we managed. There are a few minor issues left, I admit. If you happen to have a bit time on 10th or 11th to hold the camera for an hour or so, contact us! Or if there is *anything* you would wanna do to help us out a bit, don’t be shy. You don’t need to be a known Debian contributor, you don’t need to know us. Arguably, you should know Debian but then, if you’re able to spell the name correctly, you’re probably in. :-)

Apart from that, we really think it’s gonna be awesome. Not only will there be a few Debian Developers from outside Germany, like our project leader zack who we have the honor of listening to for he has the first talk on Thursday. There will also be quite a few German faces that some of us haven’t met yet — have you met Sebastian, the chief of our beloved debianforum.de, yet? We are going to have a great time and you’re a fool not to join.

Thus, a last time for all of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about: Next week there’ll be the famous LinuxTag in Berlin from Wednesday to Saturday. Right in the middle, on Thursday and Friday, we, the Debian community, will have a Mini DebConf right there. There will be talks about different Debian related things. And many active developers will be there happy to talk to you about whatever you always wanted to know or say about Debian. And then, not to forget, we’ll have a hacklab where you can easily plug in your notebook and start hacking with us. Have an idea to improve Debian? Always wanted to know how to fix a bug? You want to make Debian Squeeze the best Debian release ever? Join us — it seems we’re fighting on the same side.

When I first started using Free Software — yes, that’s quite some time ago — I found it the right thing to do. It felt like I was first time ever really controlling what my computer does. Took just a bit of time to notice I really never knew anything about it. Well, almost at least. Then when I started contributing to Free Software this obviously changed. One of the freedoms is to learn from the code you’re running. And I did it… by reading, contributing, doing nonsense with it, reimplementing it… you know the deal.

Starting to work on Debian was something that just evolved out of it. Doing so gave me the opportunity to give back. I never achieved that actually, though. At least I don’t consider my contributions even remotely sufficient to make up for the great deal of software that I use — sometimes without noticing it. Still there’s lots of stuff that I don’t have a clue of and I rely on other developers to do their (volunteer) job. Otherwise my knowledge wouldn’t help much. I could never continue kernel development if those kernel hackers all stepped back for instance. I guess, it’s getting more and more difficult the closer the piece of code is to hardware.

Another thought I had was about Free Software in general. It’s more than just the code (although it might be the most important part), it’s also a concept that needs to be communicated. Firefox on Windows shows how Free Software can have a big market share in an otherwise closed source environment. Yet I’m not sure all users know about it being open source and what that means (hear them talk about Freeware instead). And who is dealing with this conceptual stuff?

I decided to do something about all that. Now I don’t really have money but a bit I thought I could share. And I could set yet another sign by publicly talking about it, or casually mentioning that I consider Free Software and Linux a good thing. So you will see a mail signature now below all my mails. I always wondered what one might gain with such and now I found a reason to include one. It reads: